Although the price has been rising, this is bad, and it could get worse. As bitcoin can only clear 1MB about every 10 minutes, transactions can get stuck for hours, if not days.
I sent a transaction a couple of weeks ago when the mempool was only about 8MB, and it took about three hours for the first confirmation, despite my fee making my txn considered 'high priority'.
It has not quite worked out to be the peer-to-peer payment system that Satoshi described.
UPDATE 6-15-16: 35MB ouch.